Proven Ways to Increase Sales

Your sales team is your best resource for growing your business’s customer base and increasing sales. However, other aspects of your business, such as product development, marketing, and customer service, can also help increase sales.

Remember, you can increase sales in multiple ways. In addition to gaining new customers, you can focus on increasing the frequency, loyalty, and dollar amount of sales to current customers.

How to increase sales with current customers

Your current customers are your best bet to increase sales, so boosting customer retention should be the focus of your sales and marketing efforts. These people already use your products or services, so they trust you enough to purchase your solutions. If you provide them with a customer delight level of service, they will be more likely to purchase from you again, helping to increase your business’s sales.

Acknowledge current customer behavior to increase sales.

Customers expect the companies they buy from to understand their tastes, desires, and behavior. In fact, Fresh Lime found that  56 percent of customers will stay loyal to a brand they feel understands them.

Here are some strategies for learning about your customers’ needs and adjusting your tactics.

• Research current customers. To better understand your customers, create a market research plan to learn how they use your products and services. Your products may have many features, but your customers might only use one or two. They might also have difficulty using or implementing other aspects of your products or services. Learning about customer behavior will help you upgrade your products and services or tailor them to your customers’ needs for a higher price.
• Customize offerings for customers. Utilize one of the best CRM software solutions to keep and use purchase and browsing data to customize deals and to retarget customers if they abandon their cart.
• Cross-sell and upsell to current customers. Upselling and cross-selling can be effective tactics. When customers use a particular product, you can cross-sell related products that complement or add to their existing products. You must show them how they’ll benefit from purchasing other products. You can also upsell a premium product or service to help customers achieve better results, boost efficiency, reduce expenses, or grow their own businesses.
• Personalize training and service. Another approach is to provide customers with personalized training or customer service. Instead of upselling the service, use this opportunity to strengthen the customer relationship and demonstrate where you can add value. The key is to show the opportunities available to the customer instead of trying to hard-sell services they might not want.

Request customer feedback to increase sales.

Ask current customers for feedback on your products and services and how they feel about your service. Discover where you might be lacking or where customers have problems. Also, determine what makes customers happy about your customer service.

Customer feedback can identify opportunities you hadn’t considered, which can turn into new sales. For example, say you develop websites optimized to increase sales leads for your customers’ businesses. Your customers might want to improve how they interact with their customers by creating an email newsletter. You can set up a system to automate email collection and newsletter publication and connect it to a CRM system.

Increasing sales with prospects

Prospects are a potential source of new sales. Every customer was once a prospect, and you had to spend resources to convert those leads into paying customers. Prospects are aware of your business and its offerings, but they haven’t made the leap to customers yet.

Here are some ways to increase sales with prospects.

Create packages, deals, and free trials to convert prospects.

Prospects already know your existing products or services, so you might need to package your offerings differently to turn them into customers. Prospects (and current customers) like special offers because they get more for their investment and find it more convenient to purchase.

There are many ways to create special offers, including the following:

• Create packages. Combine similar products or services into one package. Optionally, combine different products or services that share a theme or address a related issue.
• Offer a price incentive. Price bundles so they’re more cost-effective than purchasing products individually.
• Create a sense of urgency. Put a time limit on a package or an offering’s availability to create a sense of urgency. State a reason for the limitations, such as stock availability or the arrival of new inventory and product lines.
• Offer free trials. Another option is to provide free trials and demonstrations of your products or services. This helps prospects see how the product or service will address their specific needs and situation without spending money.

Providing prospects with a high level of training and customer service will ensure that they use the product or service properly and get the greatest value, increasing the odds of the sale.